The report, formally released Tuesday, revealed that 141 businesses, government agencies, and other organizations had been hacked by APT1, which may have stolen "hundreds of terabytes of data" in ongoing operations "beginning as early as 2006." The report alleges that APT1 is a group operating out of the Chinese military, specifically People's Liberation Army Unit 61398.

Mandiant informed Campus Technology that two of those organizations affected by APT1's activities were higher education institutions, including "one college and one scientific research institution connected to a U.S. university." The names of all of the affected organizations have been witheld owing to concerns over confidentiality, a spokesperson for Mandiant told us.

The specific purpose of the attacks isn't clear.

"We don't have direct evidence regarding why they targeted either organization," the spokesperson explained. "However, the research institution does projects for both government and private industry in several areas that match APT1's targeted industries, including high-tech networking, communications, and manufacturing technologies."

The Mandiant report itself details tactics and tools used by APT1 and reveals more than 3,000 APT1 "indicators" in an effort to "expose and degrade APT1's infrastructure and allow organizations to bolster their defenses against APT1's arsenal of digital weapons. The indicators ... include domain names, MD5 hashes of malware and X.509 encryption certificates."

The unique report also provides video showing operations conducted by APT1, such as the one below.

The report comes on the heels of the 2013 National Intelligence Estimate that was leaked the the Washington Post just days prior to President Obama's State of the Union address last week, in which the President used the intelligence data to support his administration's cyber espionage policy agenda. The latest NIE fingered China "as the country most aggressively seeking to penetrate the computer systems of American businesses and institutions to gain access to data that could be used for economic gain," according to the Post.

The NIE, produced by the members of the American intelligence community, is an annual report whose findings are occasionally declassified and made available to the public to support policy positions, such as the 2002 NIE, whose findings about weapons of mass destruction were used in part to help justify the invasion of Iraq.

Both the 2013 NIE and the Mandiant report are now being used by the Obama administration and Congress to support controversial measures that provide the federal government with additional mechanisms to circumvent online privacy in the name of cyber security, notably the Cyber Intelligence and Sharing Protection Act (CISPA). President Obama recently signed an executive order authorizing a number of provisions contained in the previously defeated CISPA legislation.